Trim
by Mithrigil
Summary: A ritual, that an Empress may bear heirs. [Ashe and Basch. Set postgame. Follows Seams and Hem.]


Please note that this is the third in a series: **Seams** is first, and **Hem** is second. These are accessible through my profile, or by using the M-rated filters. Thank you so much for reading!

* * *

**Trim**

_**and she is staggering with his unexpected weight**_

Mithrigil Galtirglin

* * *

And it makes absolutely no sense to her, but she continues to listen, willing her eyes to stay open in the temple's lukewarm, smothering darkness.

"It is only four hours or so, for you to assist her," the Kiltias superior goes on, as if the truth of the ritual needs to be cushioned. His hands are folded in his robes and by the bulges in the cloth and the grating brush of their hem against the stone floor he is twiddling his thumbs. "Shorter than the vigil of Knights, if I recall correctly."

"Yes," she confirms.

"But Adina will be there all night," the Kiltias explains, and surely he has done so already, if his tone is any indication.

Ashe nods, and flexes her forehead to keep her focus trained.

From the moment the paling parted for her airship, nay, from shortly before, the fog will not leave her mind, a brass haze of whispers and overtones that twist the connecting nerves behind her eyes. The day itself is lovely, idyllic, the kind of sun that only shines in early spring when its anger at winter is still fresh, but the Kiltian temple swallows that light as soon as shines in it. Its halls are besconced with saprogenic crystals; the longer your path, the sparser your light, the fainter the glow of candle on tile and the louder the static, sandpaper _noise_.

Or perhaps she is merely tired.

"So you know your part, your Majesty?"

"Yes," she confirms again. "Though I do not understand how I am to vouch for the state of Adina's pregnancy."

To his credit, the Kiltias Superior allows a hissing breath not unlike a laugh, and his smile, what Ashe can see of it in this cloister's light, is more or less bemused. "The goddess will elucidate her intent," he says, in the voice of faerie-tales. "The girl will need the permission of more than cells and fluids to ensure her heir is carried to term."

Ashe is years since her fill of arbiters and gods.

"You did not sit this rite yourself, that much is plain, when you were carrying your son," the cleric chides, and again his thumbs bother the cloth of his robes. "And in that regard, it is doubly magnanimous of you, to aid Adina in her choice of a path you shunned."

"And I do not berate her choice," Ashe feels the need to clarify, and the tone seems indignant, even to her.

"Of course not," he says. "Rest now, or walk about; we will have need of you at sunset."

--

He is staring, despite himself, halted at base of the stairs, and perhaps the passersby think him one of their statues.

For a long, bleached while, she seems too tired to notice, and almost hobbles into the sun from the temple's main doors, her circlet askew on travel-matted hair. She is bright through the visor of his helm, and although he cannot hear the dry weariness of her breath he knows its shape on her lips, and he reaches for her that he may allay it.

That, she notices, and her eyes flicker wide with the scuttling fall of her sandal to the topmost stair. It fades to a knowing smile; she had not expected him, but knows why he was sent.

He bows, and closes his eyes, and thinks that Larsa has made mummers of them all.

"It _is_ a haunting place," she says when she is near him.

He straightens, and answers her, "Aye." This close to him, her weariness is evident, in the raised redness of her eyes and the yielding of one shoulder to the other. She descends to stand beside him and her posture is uneven, the hip-forward stance of duress.

But before he can tell her so, that she ought not be about, she asks, "Is there more to it than the temple?"

"Some," he admits, and knows that she is embattled, with something that perhaps he cannot see. "The town is small, but welcoming; a vineyard and a quarry occupy them. Beyond those, there is only the island itself."

"Will you show me?"

That she has _asked_ is not lost on him, a sign of her distraction, her fatigue, but something has driven her from the temple and he acquiesces, standing aside that she may lead.

The town is first, and he shadows her through it. They are silent, and it is midday, so the ruckus of the crowd that diverts around them is the saturated femininity of wares and errands, with the youths at lessons and the laborers their tasks. The town is more wood than stone, the boiling-hill streets more concrete than cobble, what with the quarry still new-cut, and the people as well, organic relics, foreign to them both.

But their silence is comfortable, and her step is surer as the shadow of the temple lets off their shoulders and the train of her skirts, blocked by buildings stories smaller. It is only a town, soon enough; and yet her waist still twitches with her tread, and her sword-arm tenses, vacant.

He asks if she is well, and she stops, and backtracks, her attention through the wood gate, east.

Basch hears the forest more than sees it.

"…Do the citizens shy from the Mist?" she whispers back at him, and it is not lost among the waning crowd or the tremolo of the magick itself.

From her shadow, he answers, "They see it, as far as I know." He has not asked.

It struck him as well, the first time; he first thought the disturbance a summer snow, and then perhaps a thick pollen; and last, he considered that they might be fae. They are not a swarm in the Mist-soaked forest, more a constancy, weathered and wet like armor unpolished after rain, no denser among the wild green of the boughs than the contorted roots.

"And they are not afraid to fell these trees, or at least a few of them…" This he has also not asked, but inferred, from the make of the houses and the few severed stumps. "I have been cautioned against walking in alone, though I would heed the warning before 'twas issued."

She turns back to him, and smiles. "We have braved worse."

He agrees.

But rather than advance, she sits only at the edge, legs outstretched sideward as she stares past the brush. "It does not pretend… The rest of this place does." She reaches forward and grasps, Abaddon-quick, and seems to catch one of the sprites. "The forest…is not glamorous," she finishes, and turns back to him. "I find it strangely comforting…that were it not for the paling, this place…"

He kneels, and sits beside her, against the nearest tree.

Her words come in absent fragments, over the persistent hiss of the air that perhaps she does not hear. "I had not realized how much I missed the hunt until," she starts, and needs not to continue. "In my first months in Dalmasca, it still throbbed in my blood. I could not sleep for the noise of the servants, I woke and took up imaginary swords, and earlier than I needed… I saw a page being caned and did not _mean_ to cast healing magicks, but…"

The image brings a smile to his lips, and a sound from his throat that might be laughter.

She unfurls her hand, and perhaps she had not caught the snow-fae after all, if its cleanliness bears any meaning. Intent on that hand, she muses, "Rasler is learning to fight now. Al-Cid insisted on blunt weapons, said it is more appropriate to a king…I would have the child learn more, but the boy is swift…he will be a fair hand with poles."

"_Are_ rounded weapons more appropriate to a king?"

She says, "I find them all the crueler. But then, I have used them afield, and Al-Cid has not."

It occurred to Basch to wonder, long ago, "What does he wield?" but he only now raises the question.

"He has been schooled with all manner of things, and swords especial, that he may understand them and their bearers. And so perhaps it _is_ given to a king, to truly wield his scepter at the sword's expense." She turns back toward the forest, her skin paling green under the leaf-twisted sunlight. "But Al-Cid has never beaten a man to death."

"Perhaps, then, the choice will stay the prince's hand," he says, and his cape rucks against the bark of the tree he is against, east-facing, moss under his left gauntlet. "A lesson that battle is an effort, and never over quick."

"Perhaps," she repeats, but no other words follow it. It is not sudden when she lies back, the trim of her skirts and bodice catching on brambles and upended leaves, and rests her head on his thigh. But it does stay him, and the dirt beneath him uproots as he accommodates her, and she stares up past the trees, blinking back the creatures as they fall. "…With what did you learn to fight?"

He answered, quietly, readily, and she is the first person in years to care or know. "The bow. But that was not fighting at the first…and then the pike. My father gave us swords only when we could hold them in one hand, with a shield in the other. And Noah, sinister-sided, ever had the advantage there," he finds himself going on, and knows not what compelled his tongue to wag so, and so ceases, to wonder.

Her pale, firewood-toned hair is fanned out against the black leather over his thigh, her circlet tangled in the fraying strands, and a few of the small not-creatures alight on it and her cheeks. He could touch her, he thinks, and would it not seem strange, this monolith of ram-horned armor, in a forest that writhes in its own Mist, with a vagrant Queen's cheek under his gauntlet? And the thought drives his back into the tree, armor groaning against it, an inorganic sound far too sudden and sharp for this perpetuity.

"It is a comfort," she whispers, "this magick, this noise. Danger, but it is a memory."

"Thought you then that you would look so kindly on the past?"

The answer is on her breath, "Not in the least," and they are as obvious and quickening to him as if battle-worn. "I hated those days as I lived them."

For minutes, after, Basch is silent as she stills, and sleeps, and he keeps the first watch against the ghosts.

--

And the Kiltias Superior is chanting, words Ashe does not understand, all loose, loaded vowels and close-lipped consonants and the perfunctory pitch of cradleside nurses. He upends a carafe over Adina and the slow water threads through all other sounds, a support more than a mute, and the girl's robes are too thick and too many to contour to her, but her hair molds to her cheeks and neck until the shorter strands rise, recalcitrant.

The intoning goes on, and Adina is doused again, but the smell is not the innocuousness of water, but a reek of fruit and fire, and Ashe's nose rebels at the stench; Adina's as well, Ashe sees before her eyes screw shut, and it is some consolation. How much time passes this way, water, liquor, water, liquor, poured over Adina's head, Ashe does not know or care to reckon, and the sound becomes just another of the shiver-raking placidity this temple is.

At some point, the words have strengthened, and the Kiltias Superior bids Adina remove her rings. The plain wedding band is rested on a pillow, as it had been borne to her on the day of, and this is placed at the foot of the great statue's pedestal. The signet ring, Adina cradles as she kneels and, hidden hands working under her new-heavy robes, slides the token up between her legs. And there it rests, with nothing but a wince to mark its passage.

Ashe's back teeth wrench.

The cleric rails on, and his own throat is irrelevant to this now, the dust of the sanctum bearing the sounds for him, and he speaks of the future in a style half-dead and the statue above him smiles over her lacquered phallus of a tongue.

She is four-armed and armed in two of them (as a Judge, Ashe thinks, wry and distracted), sickle, grey, and trident, gold. One remaining hand is an offering forward; the other clutches a man's head by its hair, severed, the remaining blood fashioned from a clear red stone and its tears, diamonds. It is not the only head the statue carries; about its neck are dozens of skulls in a chain, cemented chin to brow, _chin to brow,_ and she knows she will have counted them and all their cracks before the end. A garland of child-frail arms form the goddess' skirt, feathered and flaccid, as gold as the collar and shackles-for-anklets she wears.

And this is the goddess whose blessing Adina seeks, Ashe reminds herself, and an acid understanding sinks down from her lungs.

A hand on her shoulder—Ashe jumps, and draws a weapon that is not there—and the Kiltias Superior is bidding her kneel opposite Adina, and take the girl's hands in hers, and so Ashe does, closing her eyes to the words and Adina's schooled or at least learned responses. Minutes, and a cadence at last, "Faram," but it is hollow and ongoing, an upward, weak inflection.

He removes his hand from her, and the words, at least she understands: "Upon midnight, I will return to your Majesties; be here for her, until then."

She answers him yes, and forgets that there had never been a question.

The man is gone, and the side-door closed, and with the muttering gone there remains a base imitation of silence. Across from Ashe, Adina appears to be actually praying, ruminating, her head bowed into the cowl of her robes as they dry and her knees firm together. The girl's breathing is dry-nostril loud, and so close to Ashe that she cannot ignore it, but too regular to assert itself in this ever-buzzing, ever-humming place, and Ashe knows not if she refers to the chamber, to the temple, to the land itself.

Unbidden, or otherwise, she thinks of her dark-haired son, and that he is blessed for having _not_ sat this ritual inside her. So serious, precocious even, stern-lipped and polite, rationing his smiles so that they are a joy to her and his father. The Knights humor him, and he observes them with his white teeth outside his lip, and describes it to his mother as sewing, when she asks him what he sees. And his lord father laughs, and gathers the boy into his arms, for Rasler is Al-Cid's _hope,_ and he calls the boy "spider", and the name clings to him.

Her brothers used to call her "cactoid", prickly, and she pretended to hate them for it, and her father pretended to chide them for it, but if anyone was truly angered they all would of course have stopped. When they lay dying, she was not allowed near them for the weeks of it, and perhaps they forgot all their reasons to tease her. Their graves are empty, she recalls, and she has not visited them of their own accord in years, and it _strikes_ her, that she neglects them even as their absences rest beside her father's monument.

What does her father's shade make of her, if he has one? His jewel, his cactoid, now this near-mad, adulterous dynast-queen?

"You are troubled, your Majesty?" Adina asks, and the girl's hands are liquor-chilled where Ashe has clutched at them, her long, knot-callused fingers tangled with Adina's.

And _Rasler,_ golden, smiling Rasler is taking her hands in his before an altar so unlike this, "Yes."

The girl's voice is small, and her eyes expectant but assertive, and Ashe latches onto them that she not forget to whom she speaks. "You did not do this?"

"I did not," Ashe admits.

"Is it to do with your lord husband?"

"No, it was a choice of mine. I did not conceive on my first husband, and," she does not even know where that sentence would have gone to, and ends it.

Ashe wishes that the girl would speak again, anything that the white noise, the thrumming of the stones under their knees, might abate, might give her respite, and blessedly after who knows how long, Adina whispers. "Of course they are different…but how are they so?"

"You know now, do you not?" Ashe says, quick with the need and surprise of it. "Who my first husband was."

Adina admits, unabashed, "Larsa told me, after our last talk. I did not think it bore greater significance than that we both attribute to it. I am sorry if I trouble you."

The apology echoes, if only in Ashe's mind, and even after it dies Ashe waits, and savors it. "I thank you."

"It does make sense, that you are here."

"Yes."

"Would you have come here, done this yourself, for him?"

The thought near kills her, Fafnir's chill, Cúchulainn's unrelenting drain in the gelatinous filth about her ankles, the sparks of Vossler's own sword, the sword that _trained_ her, under hers, "The face of the world would not be thus broken had I borne his child," she nearly spits, and it does not drive the memories away. "We were wed a month, and only once consummated it; I would have birthed his legacy in the sewers, in exile, or died of having it, or worse, in my weakness been apprehended to Archades. The child would have lived to be used, and I cast aside." She breaks for air alone, as from a stolen kiss. "Would it matter, then, had I sat beneath this statue for a night?

Adina breathes, resigned, and her eyelids lower, considerate.

"My first husband is dead," Ashe says, and _believes_ it. "Al-Cid is well, but I have in addition to him for a husband, an ailing wife."

Blessedly, Ashe thinks, the girl understands her meaning. "Larsa speaks of Archadia as his _child,"_ she emphasizes, and smiles warmly, and the warmth is hardly forced but surely out of place.

"Dalmasca is not my child. She is too old, and too strong, and too stubborn. And she is not my mother; she is barren, and her sons are so by name alone." And again, Vossler's voice, as if the place itself contains him, and she is unable to restrain the tremor in her hands. "To rule her is to marry her, to be of one flesh, to lie with her however fruitless the union."

When Adina does not respond, Ashe does, to herself: and what, then, is Basch?

No one answers, not even the malicious, laughing stones.

The statue is already in the stone, someone once told her; all that remains is to free it.

"Is it auspicious, to speak of such things, here? Now?" Adina's voice is small and welcome, and Ashe closes her eyes that she may hear it but there is no change.

"You will bear Larsa's heirs. Of that I have no doubt. What does it matter, what we say? Already the child is within you, and if there are more to come the burden is between _your_ legs, not in _her_ arms," Ashe concludes, rolling her shoulder at the statue and contriving, her kingdom, her _dignity,_ for leave to destroy it.

Adina giggles, and their hands raise to mask it. "You are so audacious, your Majesty."

"It is a trait not acquired in a queenly fashion," Ashe demurs, and attempts to smile.

Whose visage does the goddess wear, Ashe wonders. Who posed, that the Kiltias might exalt her?

"But it is a queenly trait," Adina compliments.

--

He is awake, and suddenly, and sword-in-hand. But the noise is only the rustle-rapping of knuckles on his door, and he sets the blade down gently against the headboard behind him. The mattress creaks as he rises and goes to the door, sliding the covers down the starch of his undershirt and shorts, and the scrape is one sound of many in this rough-hewn room of spartan stone.

"Who goes there?" he asks through the cracks.

"…I," she answers.

Unsurprised, Basch steps back and opens it for her with a quiet deftness, and she enters just as quietly and calmly, but once she is in is rather quick about taking the door from him and shutting it, her fingertips instrument-spread on its face.

It is dark still, and this close to her he knows not if she has hung her head. "Home, or not home," she murmurs, "I mislike this place."

Basch closes his eyes, and nods, and wonders if she thinks it an apology.

"It is like the Feywood," Ashe goes on, turning to him, her voice raising and filling but still barely a whisper. "Every stone of it. I feel as if I should have set up a watch," she finishes, and the thought warms Basch, and he feels the beginnings of a smile under his beard. She backs past him, toward his unmade bed, and her face is shadowed by the distance and hanging darkness, but he sees her silhouette as she sits, and smoothes the covers aside.

He glances over his shoulder at the door, then turns back to her. "Are you," he starts, and cannot finish, _intending to lie with me?_

Her answer is to edge aside, and again, the mattress creaks. Assuring that the door is locked, Basch crosses back to her, and she is parting the covers for him, perhaps recalling that he nearly always sleeps with his back to the wall and his face to door and danger. His tread slows the closer he comes to her; is he still so apprehensive, he asks himself, even as his knees meet the covers.

"I could sleep," she explains, and looks up at him from the draped cloth of her nightgown. "Here, I mean."

And as outside the forest, he understands, and sits down, then slides back and lies under the covers on his side, facing her. She pulls in alongside him, clasping her wrists between her breasts and stretching, a handsbreadth from his chest. When the covers come down they are over her eyes and in her hair, and he smiles slightly, nudging them down to her neck. What he can see of her face seems younger than it has become, refreshingly so, but his chance to perceive that is fleeting; her cheeks curl through the shadows to a stubborn smile and she pulls the sheets and coverlet up over both their heads. Basch is jostled a little closer to her by that, and reacts backward, the cloth tightening around him. He whispers, low, confused, and quite serious, "Are you being frightened or coy, your Majesty?"

She does not answer, for the darkness and the stifled choir of a thousand insects.

For what feels a long time, they lay there, breathing evenly. Basch's eyes adjust to the dark and he sees that she is, in fact, closing her eyes and giving appearances of trying to sleep, but it is uneasier sleep than earlier, against him, the like of which he has not seen since their months afield, adesert, when fear and mistrust of him were the twin causes of her sleeplessness.

"I…am not _being_ anything," she answers, assertive for her closed eyes. "I am doing what feels best," she adds when he does not respond, and the words ring as much to herself as to him.

He knows he must ask her, and chooses the words as carefully as he can, and there are swollen seconds in the choosing that convene to minutes, drunk on the darkness. "In all its aspects?" he finally says, in the wake of a staggered exhale. "In more than the immediate?"

"Basch, do you think me a fool?"

Her words are quick, but not condemning, and she likely knows what he will say. He can feel the harried warmth of her spread to the cloth over his ear and he answers honestly, as soon as he decides what honestly is, and again the dark grows complacent and lazy in all the time he gives it. "Even the wisest among men are given to folly, and were this madness I would be less concerned. It…is not folly. And you are no fool."

Self-deprecating, she sighs, "Only a proud woman making poor choices."

"What was the choice between?"

Her eyes open, and he can nearly see them.

"At the funeral, when this all started," he clarifies in a hoarse whisper. "What did you forsake?"

And it is her turn to take her time in answering, closing her eyes and opening them, again and again, against the forced tread of her breath, and at last she looks him nearly in the eyes. "I was," she begins, and restarts, and the word fills him, "Folly. Rational, willful folly." She sighs, and it reaches his neck. "The exalted solitude of madness. Early senility. What becomes of heroes, when they become their stories." And two further almost rattling, slow breaths crawl humidly through the hair on his chin and cheeks. "They are not themselves. That is what I did not choose."

He begins to understand, or so the shadows tell him.

"I…will not let Dalmasca burn to the song of a mad queen."

"You would not have gone mad," he says too quickly.

"I _was,"_ she corrects, and he does not believe her but it is almost too loud to be false, an order. "I know madness, Basch, or at least have exchanged glances with it on the street."

"…You chose," the answer falls from his lips, "that you not be chosen for."

She holds his eyes. Their faces are closer than they had been, and her answer is against his lips, or at least the sounds of it, close enough to drown out all else in this room, even the absent ringing of his blood in his ears. "As myself, I have taken risks," she says, and the hiss of "risks" sets his beard prickling. "I have stood in the way of those who would have me dead. I have thrown down the swords and the tasks given me by beings far more powerful than I. I…I have welcomed back into my heart the man I once believed responsible for destroying all I knew and all I had…because he has been true to me…because he is the _last_ of all I knew and all I had."

Overjoyed, petrified, shot through the heart,

"It is…" she goes on, and her _eyelashes_ are splayed within his, "…not so great a risk as it could be…because of the kind of man he is."

It is hard for Basch to tell whose lips advance to the other's.

They kiss, and it is long and slow, her curled fists pressing into his undershirt just over his sternum, and soon the rest of her is against him, her knees to his thighs, the bone of her hip just above his. Her fingers shudder and she clutches in the cloth and he tilts toward her gently, an arm settling on her waist and then down to her back. She reaches up to his chin and hair and their lips have to part but she pulls him down to her, and she is not quite on her back, and he supports himself over her as best he can, but her leg curls around his ankle and he sags down into her, a low rumble in his throat. A conquering kiss, he thinks, and not for the first time, as she arches against him and pushes him back onto his side and pins his upper arm under her, and with what remains his he embraces her, hands pressing into the small of her back.

He is less ashamed, he realizes, with the damp cloth of her nightgown wrinkled against the crook of his arm and it strikes him, that he has become so readily complicit in this—but the cloth about her is riding up and her fingernails are on his shoulders and she is pulling him down to her by his neck, and there is too much cloth and not enough skin under his palms and somehow she has convinced him. Her waist is bare now, it occurs to him through his mess of nerves and warmth and darkness, and until that moment he could have been content to only kiss her.

And then there is a raggedness, her heel down-between the back of his legs, and she breaks away from his lips and tongue with a faint hiss. But her lips return to his neck, his ear, slow and not frantic, deliberate and sultry, her breathing battle-choked. "…Will you?"

She asked him something along those lines, earlier, the rustling cloth whispers.

Basch presses his pinned hand into her back, and with his free one draws her face away from his and looks her in the eyes, as if to say, ask me again, but the words do not come to him.

"…Basch," she breathes, and her chin almost sinks into his fingers, and it is the first time she has ever used his name like this. The room hums with a clanking hiss, like the crowd around a building as it burns, and he can barely see her eyes in the dark but knows they are on his. "Will you?"

He moistens his lips with a rake of his teeth and then kisses her, and it is too late to hesitate by the time he thinks to.

There is something hooked over his leg—hers—and the sheets tangle, and a cold spike runs up Basch's knees with the slap of the cloth. She latches onto his shirt from underneath, her forearms and elbows raking down the ragged skin of his back. The wrinkles of her nightgown dig into his abdomen but all is dwarfed by her lips and teeth and tongue on his, stripped-bark coarse and sweet. His fingers are splayed at the nape of her neck, in her hair, and this is where he would hesitate but _does not_, and even after she has kissed him throatless and the air he gasps in is furrowed and not enough he covers her mouth with his again, their teeth scraping together as hotly as flint, the covers chaining about their legs.

The sudden cold pulls him atop her, haphazardly, the sheets and her half-fallen pants muddling their overheated knot of legs. His chest bears down onto hers and the creased cloth between them is almost painful and he rakes against it, and it is _worse_ (but the soft ridges of her stomach, the stubborn contours of her breasts, no worse, no worse, he will _endure_) until she heaves his shirt over his head, cutting through their kiss. And he is levered into her and grates against her hips, and the groan she stifles is almost a whimper, her head thrown back against the pillow, lips squelching together as she bites them and _that_ sound will stop him.

He tries to pull back but the confusion of cloth at his legs hinders him and he is parting her knees and only now realizes that she is bare from the waist down, her chest and hips throbbing up from the bed with clanking, labored breaths. Before he can protest she is thrashing out of her nightgown and he is shoved back on his haunches. The sheets and clothing bind him down and dig into his calves and knees, and as he fumbles to touch her skin, run his hands up her sides, he finds himself falling forward and her lips move lower on him and that is _not_ going to help him support himself over her—

She swerves with him that he may fall sideways, his back to the wall. Her knees clatter around his and she trails her lips down his chest, clutching at his sides and lower back, nails sneaking into old, dead gashes in his skin. His hands have a smoother course down her back and his lips are cracked for lack of hers but as she sinks along him he clutches at her upper arms and can feel the rush of her blood through his fingertips.

The wake of her tongue is colder even than the air and Basch can feel his pores clenching around each hair she leaves wet, down his collar, his chest, just under his navel and the stammer surging out of his throat creaks like the bed. Ashe's lips _bruise_ his skin and that blissful rending has to be her lower teeth, this saw-notched relentlessness digging unchecked over the path her kisses carved, achingly slow, _ominously_ slow, a cliff's red edge too sweat-slick to climb, between his ribs along his sternum and straight up the bulge of his neck to his chin—

—and then just against his lips, more breath than heat—

His throat swells shut.

—and she _laughs—_

And he is almost screaming, and his kiss is an onslaught, crushing her against him and digging his fingertips into her scalp, her back, anywhere he can find her skin in his cavalry of haze. The sweat between them is starched and threadbare and the sheets at their ankles strain like the corners of his lips, stretched to translucence as he thrusts his tongue into her and understands how dragons breathe.

Her nails bite into his lower back and bend against his scars and he feels it behind his eyes. His knee pries between hers and topples her back to the mattress, pinning her under the challenge of her kiss, and she bucks up against him, rasping his name and he nearly chokes on their dueling tongues. Her hands twine past the band of his shorts, liquor-stinging and his lips wrench from hers with a noise like molten steel, and they are both too tangled in the protesting cloth and themselves to hear beyond it.

With a triumphant grunt she shoves him half-off her and onto his side and yanks the shorts down in one frantic swipe. He knows not what she is doing or how many hands are upon him but he is boiling against her and in her grasp, her fingernails raising welts beneath the wrinkles at the base, the slick skin of her inner thighs along the shaft and _even her hair_ as she parts her knees, straining, still wound up in those obstinate vine-wrought sheets, and he can do naught but fight through their kiss to keep it and himself.

He only knows that he is inside her, _after._

She breaks a leg free from the groping sheets and digs her heel into his back with a ragged, stifled gasp that clashes against his own before it forms. He thrusts clumsily, shocked, deliberate, almost apologetic but she burns around him, wet and sudden and rough. His tongue is chalk-dry and their kiss is desperate, the walls of her mouth swallowing his half-formed roars.

When his back slams into the mattress he is hardly surprised and the hoarse rumble that escapes his throat spreads through the air between their faces. He cannot tell if his eyes are closed or it is morning for the searing brightness, and her silhouette is gone, black against his own. She stretches out on top of him, reaching between their legs and anchoring her right hand on his inner thigh just above where he's entered her, her other hand on his beard.

A quake races through him from his cloth-strangled ankles, an echo of old chains, padlocks too rusted to be absolved by keys.

She writhes and something shifts and he braces the wide of his feet on the bed's frozen bars. Over the breath he craves he stares up at her, the tensing bone of her arm between their chests as she withdraws over him. Was that a cur's-whine on his exhale? A teenager's crack?

Her stone-coarse fingers spider and close around him, even as she perches shallowly on what stays within her.

He knows not what part of her he holds and less of what it matters, only that he is ungentle and her skin is red-raked under his palms, but she rocks, strokes, presses down into him with all her weight and there is no rule or rhythm to it. Her lips are on his ear, over his eye, along the scar until his head tosses sideward and he thrusts up at her. The muscles of her arm tighten and shudder in time with the pressure on his groin, and his toes are ringed with chill of the footboard's bars. Somewhere between the pounding and clashing and _Ashe_ he finds that they are tilting, that it is _her_ back angled toward the wall now, her leg under his hip and something strikes him as off but she surges against him and her knuckles spear into his thighs and somewhere he hears metal grating against itself. She lets go of him and hammers her hips against his, strangling his thighs with her leg and he kisses her shoulder only because her head is thrown back with the force of it. He thrusts _ambitiously_ and there are sounds of warfare, catastrophe, ruin, and her talons and teeth in the rends of his skin, and her voice veined through it all. She almost mortars his pelvis into hers, and he cannot tell whether the hands on the small of his back are palms or fists or stone.

Something _ends._

Her teeth tear into his ear and even that does not quite restrain her, her cry less a sound than an assault on his nerves and bones, and he is too choked and shocked and white-hot-pained to _see_ and his throat swells around itself, scalded on his own blood.

Shuddering, he understands, when the world returns. Cold. Her teeth loosening against his raw ear, the lock of her legs about him creaking and retreating. The hanging skin of her inner thighs, her prickling hair dripping with sweat. Her breath, short and wheezing, insect-like. And it _scares_ him, and he grasps for her face, finds her eyes in the eroded darkness, and they are wet at the edges. He tries to say her name, and not _your majesty,_ her name, but the sounds crumble in on themselves and his lips break, chapped and soundless. Her temples contort with the effort of opening her eyes, almost as if through a heavy Mist, and she is shivering all over, her short, haggard breaths not even reaching his face.

"_Ashe,"_ he can finally say, firmly and hoarsely and burned and inside him his heart is threatening his lungs.

Again she closes her eyes, her skin stammering under his hand. She forms the words before sounding them, rehearsing or remembering, waking from death. "I…I am all right…I…"

She shivers, and he drapes an arm over her side, and the muscles beneath him twitch like a rabbit's hind leg. The footboard thuds against the floor, whetstone quick and hissing after. She is stretched thin, limp, haggard, and he _needs _her to look at him and answer him, but cannot even finish the question aloud, "Is this…" _what you want?_

Words do follow, faraway and far-between, suppositions and noises until she relents. He presses his palm almost absently into her back, and runs his other hand through her hair, and knows that when she recalls what she meant to say, it will have changed.

It is long before she sleeps, and longer for him. He tries to lie facing her, but cannot, and he is on his back soon enough, adjusting the sword at his bedside. Even after that, he is facing the door, shielding her from foes that will not be entering that way, when they arrive.

--

And the mattress sags between them when her eyes stagger open, the lashes snapping through a half-frozen crust. The room is fog-dark and his beard a haggard shadow, nearly all silver now, coarse and untempered against the tip of her nose.

"Morning," he whispers, as if to confess that it is. The words are not to her, but to the heavy air above his lips as he stares upward, his eyes closed small and resigned.

Her shoulders are bare; all of her is bare, she realizes, when the reptile-tongues of cold patter against her spine. The shivering carries through to the bed and its frame whimpers, and the very dust in the corner scrapes against itself and chatters, innocuous, the weather, the state of the world.

She takes his hand, from where it lays across her waist. His knuckles hiss-click past hers, the rough and pock-marked skin like wet sand, from texture to hue. He turns to her, and his hair is tendriled to itself, a battlefield of grey with pockets of gold resistance, matted across his forehead and tangled in his eyebrows. He mouths something—her name perhaps, if the shuddering of his throat accedes to that—and tightens his fingers over hers.

"I," she begins to say, but a shadow breaks through the light under the door and takes the words from her.

Anchoring herself on his hand, she curls to a kneel, and then to sit, obstinate snaps of air rippling within her spine and shoulders. He slides feet-first off the mattress and does not let go of her, standing slowly. Another man would lead her to a dance floor, with posture such as this, or help her, ostensibly, from between the curtains of a sedan-chair.

Uneasily, she rights herself off the bed, untangling her red-creased legs from the sheets. Her pantaloons slip off her ankle and onto the mattress—they had been there all night, she realizes, only to be slid back on. She lets fall his hand and bends to step back into her clothing, the eyelet at the hem thick and white where the rest is ivory and rank with their sweat. Her nightgown she finds curled against his foot, like a pet. She looks up, and he has noticed it as well, and a faint, somber smile strains his chin. He kneels, and gathers it up for her, but when he rises he seems not to know what to do with the garment.

He is a different kind of thin, she realizes, than what prison had wasted him away to, all those years ago. On the heels of that thought, she realizes that, if he ever regained the strength that was taken from him, it cannot show.

Tentative, almost boyish, he comes toward her, finding the base of the nightgown and turning it right-side-out. The cloth rustles almost drunkenly, and he slides it over her head (it is like a coronation, she thinks, without humor), and backwards. Her laugh is perturbed as she rights it, her nipple catching under one thick strap before the cloth falls properly. He sighs, and it is like an apology, and perhaps she tells him not to mind.

Her eyes are affixed on the armor in the corner, mounted on its mannequin and flickering, death-green, in the scant light. Basch is kneeling, now, piling the sheets on the edge of the bed and excising his cast-off garments from them. He has others, she does not doubt, and is proven correct when he treads across the floor (his feet sound _wet_ on the floor, wet and sickly, _Nabudis_) and pulls a small satchel from behind that carapace of armor and sets it on the nearby wicker-seat chair.

His back is very raw, she marks; she hopes it is only the light.

Stretching, he pulls a clean undershirt on, then thinks better of it and shakes his head, turning to her as he pries it off. "I should bathe," he says, and again it is not to her, and she only hears it because she is listening and the fibers of the room have cruelly ceased their noise.

Perhaps she agrees.

The helm of that armor looms beyond his shoulder, and he glances back at it, a flicker that denotes it unbidden, and then his eyes are on the floor, and then on her. His shirt dangles almost to the floor, the ghostly arm brushing the chapped and veined panels.

She closes her eyes, and by the time her chest heaves with the sigh she knew would come it is against his. Even as she embraces him and buries her face in his bare, goosefleshed collar she sees the tableau as if a bystander, and disparages how fragile she must appear against him. And she bites back her curses with his lips, and it is a comfort, to feel him trembling and his hesitation at her waist, to feel just above her cheekbone the throbbing of his broken skin, bruised hot and black around the red scar of his ear.

When they part, it is with a boiling click, lips ragged and drained. Her hands slide down his arms and ultimately fall, and she steps back from him, holding his gaze that he might not hang his head or turn from her or "And I…should go," she says, and it _is_ to him.

He shadows her to the door—he moves so naturally when he is naked, she muses, and thinks that the state does not carry a meaning for him at all—and their steps almost crackle through the room, like wax pooling into itself. Her hand is on the catch, and then the doorknob, and then on his wrist as he turns her around and _kisses her,_ the doorframe ajar along her back and one bare, slipping foot in the hall, and she is staggering with his unexpected weight—

"My Lady," his teeth and tongue form against hers as she backs away and into the corridor, the door silent, present, _silent._

Her lips part raggedly and shiver until she smiles, or at least believes she does, as door closes on the last sliver of his face.

The hall is colder than his room, and a tremor snakes up her legs from the floor every time she pads down onto it, forgetting which room is meant to be hers, which way is south, every warrior's instinct that had remained with her. She reaches for the wall and her fingertips meet stone, new and smooth, and catch on the corner in a breach of mortar. The lights are crystalline and candle-mist, pristine and artificial, and perhaps it is not morning after all, she thinks.

And then the murmuring washes toward her, and the snap of double-doors; at the end of the hall, yards far enough to evade a beast, the Kiltias are chanting (that language as old as Basch's songs of home) with the distant dispassion of things undead. Adina is among them, her robes sagging and her shoulders cowed but her head upright, raggled hair near glowing in its difference from the men around her. The Kiltias Superior is beaming, and rested, and his tread is even as he follows the procession through the central corridor, and they are gone from her sight even as their voices double back to her. The words consume themselves, the tones maggot-gorged.

Even before the sound has died, Ashe is walking again. The chill refuses to leave her legs and soon she is on the balls of her feet, tracking unaware prey, a phantom sword in her hands—

—It is not unlike the mouth of a cave, she reasons, this open expanse of door.

Candles and crystals both; she feels them, and the humid warmth almost pets her as she stands in their long, acolyte shadows, and it is sickening. The arms of the statue, weapons resplendent, refract the combating glow into her hundred and four hollow eyes (his helm, Ashe thinks, his brother's helm) and the lolling sockets and blue-black tongue of the severed head clutched in her fist. No less an obvious illusion, Ashe assures herself, no less a symbol, no less a tradition that it never occurred to her to follow.

That one open palm still beckons forward, to receive (and to receive, Ashe knows too well, is to take), and her tile-crested face smiles, stretched thin over its stone-wrought skull.

Murmurs, again, and chant, behind her; it never does fade.

--

He is armed, and armored, and throbbing with it. The sockets of his visored eyes ring against the light, and his ear, goose-egged and pulsing and _wonderful_ sends arrows through his sinuses, needles, quills of wakefulness. The buzzing of the forest, sun-sharp and serrated, pelts against his greaves and cuirass like hail.

The town is behind him. He suspects that it will someday be a city, strong-walled and unimportant, tactically useless but craved like its wine, a mark for hunters of rarest game whose prize is posterity alone.

Posterity, he repeats to himself, and the word is coarse and filthy, at the sourest of his tongue.

The forest compels him. Dead men whisper, dead hands rest upon his shoulders, passing through the pauldrons of his armor and leather and skin, the crest of sleep in his blood. They hold him. They sing.

The language is his.

--

* * *


End file.
